In the world of online advertising, behavioral targeting is fast becoming one of the more popular methods to increase the effectiveness of online campaigns. Behavioral targeting uses nonpersonally identifiable information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior to select which advertisements to display to that individual. For example, someone who visits a website about Hawaii might see ads for Hawaiian vacations during subsequent visits to nontravel-related sites.

Founded in 2006 by two online ad network experts, eXelate Media Ltd. (www.exelate.com) is a digital data exchange that matches online data providers with ad networks to help the latter deliver highly targeted ads. eXelate’s partners are the data providers, such as category specific websites, widgets and social networks, which provide targeting data used by ad networks to improve advertising performance. eXelate’s serving system sits between data providers and ad networks, adding value to a complex ecosystem that is critically dependent on performance and availability.

eXelate is the only behavioral-targeting data exchange offering the scale needed for measurable success in behaviorally targeted online advertising, with data on more than 80 million unique monthly visitors and access to many of the top 30 ad networks. With that kind of scale, performance is essential.

“Our business partners count on ultrareliability, and it’s not acceptable for our service or the ad network’s services to be down,” says Elad Efraim, chief technology officer of eXelate. “It hurts not only our reputation but our partner’s as well. Our partners depend on live, healthy data pixels from ad networks. Dotcom-Monitor is an essential part of our delivery strategy.”

eXelate has a two-prong technical approach to help it maintain its position as the leader in behavioral targeting. eXelate has built a highly scalable, ultrareliable and highly redundant infrastructure to support its service, which is based on patent-pending algorithms that make it easy for its users to participate in the exchange ecosystem.

Performance monitoring is the second critical component of eXelate’s deployment strategy. Using Dotcom-Monitor, eXelate monitors the availability, accessibility and performance of its services as well as the health of serving systems used by the ad networks that are part of the exchange.

“Like any ecosystem, the success of the environment depends on the health of individual members of the community, in this case a community of trusted partners,” Efraim says. “We use Dotcom-Monitor to monitor the ad networks in our exchange, and whenever we detect a performance issue we immediately stop distribution from that ad network.”

Each minute of the day, Dotcom-Monitor’s synthetic monitoring agents, strategically located in cities worldwide, check on the accessibility and availability of the pixels from the ad network servers. Dotcom- Monitor instantly generates an alert whenever a performance issue occurs, should it fall outside user- configurable perimeters. Dotcom-Monitor alerts are delivered as SMS, email, wireless email, SNMP or phone alerts, depending on user preferences. eXelate has enabled email and SMS alerting to notify its IT resources when problems are detected.

“Normally the ad networks have their own monitoring as they are real time services, but in some cases we find issues before they’re are aware of the issue, as Dotcom-Monitor is checking performance every minute,” Efraim says. “Whenever there’s a latency or downtime issue, we receive an alert from Dotcom- Monitor and we pull the ad network out of our distribution system. Once we get an uptime alert, we wait a while to ensure it’s running smoothly and then reactivate the network on our serving system. We are able to provide a value-added benefit on top of our standard service that further strengthens our customer relationships.”

eXelate’s customers represent many of the world’s largest ad networks. “Part of the value that Dotcom- Monitor provides is its ability to monitor as frequently as once per minute, which is essential give the size and complexity of our exchange,” he says. “ Additionally, the scope of our service means we’re monitoring a lot of networks, and Dotcom-Monitor not only scales easily but offers extremely competitive pricing for monitoring so many tasks.

“Like any digital marketplace, our business is built on the relationship between ecosystem partners. Dotcom-Monitor is the assurance we and our partners need to keep the system health and profitable.”